{"id":9232,"date":"2018-04-05T18:26:45","date_gmt":"2018-04-06T00:26:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=9232"},"modified":"2018-04-10T08:06:00","modified_gmt":"2018-04-10T14:06:00","slug":"the-world-is-very-different-from-a-pagan-perspective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=9232","title":{"rendered":"“The World is Very Different from a Pagan Perspective”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

How do you explain it them?<\/p><\/div>\n

A couple of days I sat down with an interviewer who had read an old essay of mine, “The Hunter’s Eucharist,” also published as “The Nature of the Hunt.<\/a>” (It\u00a0 appeared along with works by writers more articulate than I in A Hunter’s Heart: Honest Essays on Blood Sport<\/em>,<\/a> edited by David Petersen<\/a>, one of the best nature writers out there.<\/p>\n

When I wrote it in the early 1990s, I was maybe more sure of how to talk about the universe than I am now. At least, that is what I ended telling the interviewer, giving him the old story about how the American anthropologist Irving Hallowell<\/a>, after learning that in the Ojibwe<\/a> language stones are grammatically animated (treated as alive), asked a tribal elder, “Are all stones alive.” The man thought a moment and replied, “Some are.”<\/p>\n

(Or maybe they are experienced as alive some of the time, depending on many things\u2014that is me talking, not Hallowell.)<\/p>\n

This interviewer was all right\u2014not capital-P Pagan, but someone who had thought about nature, hunting, and spirituality quite a bit. To be\u00a0 honest, “spirituality” is not a term that I fully comprehend, but I have to use it here.<\/p>\n

The more I live, the more complexity I sense in the seen and unseen universe. This makes it harder and harder to talk to monotheists, who think that we merely replace the True God with a set of inferior replacements but otherwise think and worship much as they do.<\/p>\n

At the Pagan Square blog portal, Guz diZerega has started a series of posts called “Viewing the World through Pagan Eyes<\/a>.” He puts the communication problem this way<\/p>\n

Christian-derived views see the world as a collection of things initially created and ordered by God. Secularists accepting this distinction replace God with predictable laws. There is a deep distinction between human subjectivity, and the objective nature of everything else. Some secular scientists accept the dichotomy but reject consciousness as a fundamental property of reality, hoping to reduce all subjectivity to impersonal objective processes. The \u2018illusion\u2019 of mind is a side effect of determinism, and not an active part of reality.<\/p>\n

A Pagan outlook implies what we call subjectivity and objectivity both exist \u2018all the way down.\u2019 People can be studied as if they were simply objects and there is an element of awareness in even the simplest phenomena, but reality includes both. This view is not unique to Pagans, some physicists share it, for example. But it is rarely treated seriously in many other sciences, particularly the social sciences. The social sciences usually incorporate the distinction between people and the rest of the world or, alternatively, seeks to understand us using the same \u2018objective\u2019 approaches used to understand all else.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I took the title of this post from Gus’s first post, and I am looking forward to reading them all. We need to realize how different we are.<\/p>\n

 <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of days I sat down with an interviewer who had read an old essay of mine, “The Hunter’s Eucharist,” also published as “The Nature of the Hunt.” (It\u00a0 appeared along with works by writers more articulate than I in A Hunter’s Heart: Honest Essays on Blood Sport, edited by David Petersen, one of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3,270,142,5,12],"class_list":["post-9232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-blogging","tag-hunting","tag-monotheism","tag-paganism","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-2oU","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":9877,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=9877","url_meta":{"origin":9232,"position":0},"title":"“The Importance of Rituals to the Hunt”","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 11, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"I have written a little about the intersection of hunting and ritual, but today I would ask you to read Jeremy Climer's blog post \"The Importance of Rituals to the Hunt.\" Before we go any further, we should define both \u201ctradition\u201d and \u201critual\u201d because people often use them interchangeably.\u00a0\u00a0Although traditions\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"animals\"","block_context":{"text":"animals","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=animals"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/bull-8-16-2015.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/bull-8-16-2015.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/bull-8-16-2015.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/bull-8-16-2015.jpg?resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":1229,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1229","url_meta":{"origin":9232,"position":1},"title":"Greenwood’s Anthropological Study of Magic","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 19, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"British anthropologist Susan Greenwood is interviewed at Pagans for Archaeology about her new book, The Anthropology of Magic.In this new book I have taken that argument further and related it to a classical anthropological debate on mystical mentality; and I have also explored the nature of reality in relation to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"anthropology\"","block_context":{"text":"anthropology","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=anthropology"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=chascli-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1845206711","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2324,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2324","url_meta":{"origin":9232,"position":2},"title":"Quick Review: ‘Pagan Metal’","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 31, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"M. and I watched Pagan Metal: A Documentary (dir. Bill Zebub, 2009) Saturday night. It was flaccid. We gave up on it midway through. (Netflix has it.) What we saw was primarily rambling interviews with members of three bands: Alan Averill of Primordial (Ireland), and musicians from Korpiklaani and Finntroll,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Finland\"","block_context":{"text":"Finland","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=finland"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/01\/PaganMetal-116x150.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6487,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6487","url_meta":{"origin":9232,"position":3},"title":"The Zells’ Biographer on “Living Your Myth”","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 21, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"John Sulak, who co-wrote Modern Pagans for RE\/Search and worked for a decade on The Wizard and the Witch, the new biography of Oberon and Morning Glory Zell, gives interviewer Anne Hill his own take on the Zells, the writing process, the Church of All Worlds, and others in their\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13446,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=13446","url_meta":{"origin":9232,"position":4},"title":"A Knife in the Woods","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 11, 2023","format":false,"excerpt":"M. and I went yesterday to check our favorite mushroom grounds. The radar had shown thunderstorms up there earlier in the week , but whatever rain fell had soaked right in. Nothing was coming up yet, not even LBMs. ((The mushroom hunter's catch-all term: \"Little brown mushrooms.\" Like \"little gray\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Colorado\"","block_context":{"text":"Colorado","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=colorado"},"img":{"alt_text":"Large butcher knife on forest floor.","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/found-knife-768x441.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/found-knife-768x441.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/found-knife-768x441.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":1662,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1662","url_meta":{"origin":9232,"position":5},"title":"Wicca: ‘Terrifying’ but ‘Unobtrusive’","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 2, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Toward the end of her interview today on National Public Radio's Fresh Air, Samantha Bee of The Daily Show describes being raised by a Wiccan mother whose ceremonies were \"terrifying,\" even though the presence of the religion was \"unobtrusive.\" Well, no one expects comediennes to be logical. What is funny\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"journalism\"","block_context":{"text":"journalism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=journalism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9232"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9279,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9232\/revisions\/9279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}